What is the Pacific Islands Forum? How a summit for the world’s tiniest nations became a global draw

NUKU’ALOFA, Tonga (AP) — As leaders of Pacific nations were welcomed to their annual meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, on Monday, they were greeted first by torrential rain and then by an earthquake.

The magnitude 6.9 quake was deep enough not to cause damage, but the long shudder and ankle-deep water served as a reminder of the natural vulnerabilities of many of the member countries of the Pacific Islands Forum, who are locked in an existential struggle for economic and environmental survival.

It also underscored the tension at the heart of an event that once barely captured the world’s notice and now draws delegations from dozens of countries across the globe — the way a fierce skirmish for geopolitical influence in the South Pacific among major powers further afield threatens to overtake local concerns, often to island leaders’ dismay.

“We don’t want them to fight in our backyard here. Take that elsewhere,” Baron Waqa, the forum’s secretary-general and a former president of Nauru, told reporters last month.

Still, there are more than 1,500 delegates from more than 40 countries at this year’s meeting of Pacific member states, all hoping to further their agendas in a region where oceans, resources and strategic power have grown increasingly contested.

Founded in 1971, the Pacific Islands Forum brings together 18 member states to discuss and coordinate responses to the issues confronting a remote and diverse region, who know that their countries — with populations as small as 1,500 people — attract more notice on the global stage when they speak with one voice. Its leaders — from Pacific Island nations, some of them among the world’s most imperiled by rising seas, as well as Australia and New Zealand — have long been at the